


traveler's insurance

by wreckageofstars



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Doctor and Graham BroTP I don't make the rules, Drama, Duty of Care, Family, Gen, One-Shot, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18491446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: [“Is this what you do, then?” he asks, and he keeps his voice mild. Unassuming. “When we're not looking, I mean. Between Saturdays. You tidy up. You make things neat. You do all the dirty work.”]The Doctor lands in Graham's begonias, and somehow it's the least of his problems.





	traveler's insurance

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! So this was written in response to a prompt (which was 'duty of care') from the wonderful people running the Thirteenth Doctor fanzine that's currently in the works! You can find them @thirteenfanzine on tumblr if you'd like to learn more! I'm super excited to be contributing to such an awesome project, and if you'd like to read more (exclusive!) works from myself and many other talented writers and artists you should definitely check it out!
> 
> Quick and unedited, but I hope you enjoy! Thanks so much for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought.
> 
> \- W

He's been a light sleeper, since Grace died. And the wheezing, aching groan that invades his dreams is too tangible not to be real, too fantastical to be anything but reality.

He opens his eyes with a sigh to early morning, grey and dim, muddles his way into his slippers and wraps himself up in a bathrobe, stepping quietly, so Ryan stays sleeping. The young need their dreams more than people like him do – and it stands to reason that at least one of them should get the benefit of a full night's rest. There had been no tell-tale crunch of furniture being crushed, and so he knows better than to look in the sitting room. He heads straight for the door in the kitchen and lets himself out into the back garden instead.

There's no moon to shine watery on what remains of his flower beds. Only more shadows, grim and grey and formless. He steps towards the TARDIS, still and silent, where it's landed near the fence. Looking like it always does, like it could never have been anywhere else, a simple fact of the landscape. But his breath is still feathery in his throat, trepidation tangled there, caught. There's something off, something wrong, something that begins and ends with the fact that it's not Saturday afternoon.

The doors open at his touch, and he steps through, resigned. Smoke lingers in the air, chalky, acrid. She's slumped against the console, expression smooth and untroubled, and if it weren't for the blood matted in her hair, the faint singe of her coat, he'd almost think she were sleeping.

He knows better, though.

“You've flattened my begonias,” he says tiredly. There's no reply. He steps closer, into the haze of smoke and the ambient glow and the lingering violence, and lays her flat on the ground. Runs through the checklist: bleeding, stopped; heartbeats, strong; skin, cool; pupils, sluggish. Fumbles off his bathrobe and tucks it under her head. “Hell of an entrance, Doc.”

Her eyelids flicker, but she doesn't wake. He scrubs a hand down his face and stands, knees aching.

“I'll be back,” he says. “I'd say don't go anywhere, but – ”

He knows better.

When he returns, two cups of tea steaming in his hands, ten minutes have passed and she's sitting up, staring at him groggily.

“Hello,” she says, after a moment, long enough that he figures she's misplaced his name but is too polite to say so. Her eyes narrow into a squint. “Graham.”

There they go.

He passes her the cup with seven cubes of sugar stirred into it resentfully and lowers himself to sit beside her, wordless.

“Sorry,” she says, after a moment. “Telepathic circuits. Started a revolution and then got on the wrong side of it, took a bit of a wobble, and I was thinkin' about – ”

Her breath catches. She blinks, and he can see her thinking, practically see the wheels turning in a way that's usually far better hidden. A hard hit to the head, then.

“ – somewhere safe.” Her eyes flick to his, watching. She looks tired, is all he can think. Her hair is longer than it had been on Saturday. Her face is more worn. “Sorry,” she says again, like she's going to leave. Like she's already said too much.

Their adventures on the weekend never end like this, all crushed begonias and smoke-scattered air. She didn't win this time, he thinks, though she hasn't said as much. It's visible in the line of her shoulders, the twist of her mouth. He can see injustice, still pooled in her eyes, sour. Defeat.

“Is this what you do, then?” he asks, and he keeps his voice mild. Unassuming. “When we're not looking, I mean. Between Saturdays. You tidy up. You make things neat. You do all the dirty work.”

 _You don't always win_.

He watches her mentally discard lies like a series of bad cards, flip through them like a chequebook, but there's too much smoke in the air for any of them to be convincing, and they both know it.

“The universe doesn't stop,” she says finally, “while I'm takin' you all to Space Majorca.”

“Don't I know that?” He takes a sip of tea to hide the tightness in his jaw. “Don't we all know that?”

“I have a duty.”

“Rubbish. Says who?”

“Says – ” She gapes at him, disappointed, and it shouldn't hurt as much as it does. “Says the universe,” she breathes. “Says me. Says – the breath in my lungs and the blood in my veins. _Duty_ is only sayin' to yourself, 'I can, and so I should', and then – doin' it.”

He looks at her for a long moment.

“Don't we have a duty, too, then?”

 _Gotcha_ , he thinks, but there's no victory in it. Her lips press together and she looks away.

“Maybe,” she admits.

“Why this, then? Why – ” He fumbles, smoke settled in his nose, the fog of early morning wrapped around his ears. “You told us it wouldn't always be safe. Coming with you was a choice we made.”

“Was it? Offer a child a suitcase full of sweets and they'll take it,” she says, and it's tinged bitter, surprising. He's never heard her bitter before. A smile catches her, brief, sharp. “Offer someone the whole universe – ”

The smile falls.

“But it's not the whole universe, is it.” He sets his tea down, watches the vibrations from the motion ripple across it. “It's a lie, what you're sellin'.”

“No,” she protests, but that face is an open book, when she lets it be. “No, it's just,” she scrambles, searching for something in-between truth and falsehood that will leave everybody happy. “It's just – traveler's insurance.”

A breath.

“Life insurance,” she mutters, and the words escape her before she can bite them off. “I have a duty to you too, you know. Duty of care. Haven't always – ”

She looks down into her hands, listless in her lap. Smudged with soot.

“Haven't always followed through,” she whispers. “So maybe it's not you I'm sellin' the lie to.”

She won't say it, and he won't ask, but he can feel the breath of other people on the nape of his neck, feel their presence like ghosts, lingering. People from before. Long and lost, if he's read the room right. Just shadows, now. Memories.

Long and lost, and that should worry him more than it does.

“Is it duty, then,” he asks, frowning, “or is it selfishness?”

“Why can't it be both?” A question for a question, and if that isn't the Doctor in a nutshell, he doesn't know what is. She drums her fingers on the grate. “That's what I was trying for, anyway. I thought I could keep everyone safe this time, I thought I could stick to the boring bits, the simple bits, the beautiful bits. But there are – children, crying,” she says, fingers curling into fists on the floor. “Always. And I can't look away, Graham. I can't walk away.” She smiles again, and it's still bitter, still old. “But I need the lie.”

It doesn't sit quite right, is the thing. The idea that their Saturdays, so fantastic, so unimaginable, so dreamlike and special and wonder-filled, are only a stop-gap on the way to the real universe. That the competence and the magic and the times that they've won are all a thin veneer. A fantasy. But he's seen the way she panics when things don't go to plan, he's seen the fear in her eyes the few times they've veered close to true disaster.

If he were very old, and very kind, and very scared, then maybe he'd want the lie too.

“What is the lie, then? Go on, Doc. So I know what I'm meant to be deliverin'.”

Her eyes are dull and her face is pale, but the smile is real, he thinks.

“The universe is simple and uncomplicated. The bad things are always very bad, and the good things are always very good,” she whispers. “The choices are always easy, and we always make the right ones. We always get there in time, and we always win. No one is ever hurt, and no one is ever lost.” She swallows. “And no one ever leaves.”

Silence, for a beat. Graham sighs.

“It's a nice story,” he says, quiet. “But between you and me, I think I'd prefer the truth.”

“Would you?”

“Already living it, aren't I? Aren't all of us? Life on Earth might not be all that spectacular, but it's no picnic, either. There's no lie down here to get us all through, not really. Maybe we need that truth you're so desperate to get away from.”

And now he's the one skirting around grief, talking around the gravel in his throat.

“Graham,” she says, quietly, and it's terribly kind and he can't quite stand it.

“Tell me the truth, Doc,” he says, ragged, around the careful, ancient sympathy in her eyes. “I'll give you the lie, if you want it, I won't tell the kids, but I can take it, I promise.”

She breathes out, and it's not quite a sigh.

“The truth?” She fixes her gaze up, up, like she can see the stars through the ceiling of the TARDIS, through the thickness of the clouds and the smog. Maybe she can. “The truth is that there are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream. Where there are people made of smoke and cities made of song. The truth is that somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else,” she glances down at the mugs cooling between them, smiling, “the tea is getting cold.”

“And what does that all mean?”

“It means there's work to do.”

“Terrible work.”

“Nah. The only work, Graham.”

“Why?”

“Because I can,” she tells him, firm. “And so I should.”

“Is it really as simple as all that?”

“If you decide it is.”

He scoffs a laugh at that, head shaking, but he can feel a fond smile creeping across his face.

“Alright, then,” he says. “But you shouldn't do it alone. There's no need to keep it all neat for us, Doc. We're only human.” The smile fades. “We've all had our fair share of terrible things. We can handle it.”

“Oh, I know you can.” She leaves the implications written in the line of her brow, and he knows he hasn't won this one today.

Honestly. Sometimes, he really does feel like the only adult in the room.

But the thing is, there's sympathy in turn, crawling up his throat, and he can't be harsh, he can't be unkind. It all has a logic, it all has a story, and who is he to say, really, how an ancient and terrible being with an inexplicable fondness for custard creams and humanity should go about their business?

His lifetime is a blink of her eye. That she bothers to listen to him at all is, quite frankly, a miracle.

“I won't tell them,” he says, finally, when the silence grows too thin. “Yaz and Ryan.” They're young. He suspects they might need the lie at least half as much as the Doctor does. “And I won't – I suppose I can't stop you. But it don't have to be an accident, landing here. Do your duty, if you feel like you have to. But come for tea, afterwards.”

“Graham – ”

“No buts. You want the lie, you'd better work for it. You've got a duty of care, but so have I. Honestly, you kids.”

“ _Oi_! I'm older than your civilization, for the record.”

He fixes his face into something sterner and she wavers.

“Fine,” she mutters, picking herself gingerly up off the ground. A beat. “Sorry about your begonias.”

He clambers up with a groan. “You can make it up to me on Saturday.”

Her eyes light up. “Space begonias!” She considers. “We'll have to go to Mars. In the 51st century. They terraform a botanical garden that takes up half the planet.”

“Sounds beautiful.”

“Worth the price of admission, I'd reckon.”

“Will the insurance cover it?”

“Always.” She smiles, and it's very old, and very sad. “Until it can't.”

“Well, then.” He looks up at the ceiling and tries to imagine the stars beyond it. Mars, twinkling in the distance, shrouded in clouds and dust. Hanging in the sky, waiting.

“That's all any of us can ask for, isn't it.”

 


End file.
